Tag Archives: ChickFilA’s

Dan Cathy, president and COO of Chick-Fil-A, has just posted this video to the company’s Facebook page in which he responds to the recent publicity surrounding his company’s years-long history of supporting anti-gay groups. Cathy says that while “marriage has always been a priority for Chick-Fil-A,” just because his company provides sandwiches to an anti-gay hate group, that doesn’t mean they don’t respect all their customers. A sample comment from the company’s FB page, where pro-gay messages are being scrubbed: “Sodomy isn’t love. Calling sin sin is not hypocrisy. Supporting what is right and good is not evil.”

So alright, let’s begin with some background on the two players we’ll be discussing:

The Winshape Foundation is the charitable of Chick-Fil-A and its founder Truett Cathy. The foundation has several Christian focuses, all focused on strengthening certain values. Fair enough. In a perfect world we would all be able to come together and jointly work for some of their very valid goals.

Okay, so Ruth has been pushing something called The Reel Love Video Challenge. We showed you a promo for the contest back in December. Basically, the idea is for young people to make :30 second videos telling what lifelong love means to them. And again, just like with the Winshape Foundation’s work, the whole contest would be totally benign and even positive, if not for Ruth/NOM’s agenda towards LGBT people.

Right, so today we were mindlessly knocking around the Reel Love video site, primarily as a distraction. However, through our bored surfing we happened to catch note of a few new references to something unfamiliar to our “culture war” eyes. Something called LoveIsHere.com:

Never before hearing of such a site, we grew curious. So the next thing we did was take a look at the coding of the Ruth Institute’s “Reel Love” site 9as one commonly does, right?). This is what we found:

For the non-HTML geeky: Basically the highlighted coding shows that the frame on the site into which the videos are posted is actually not hosted on Ruth’s “Reel Love” site, but rather is coming from a separate, unannounced ‘Love Is Here” site. So growing even more curious, we headed over to LoveIsHere.com, where the only content at this point is this:

Okay, so this landing page is written in the same theme and style as the “Reel Love” contest. So it would seem that this is a planned effort that Ruth will use to turn this contest into further movement for their cause. Right. Whatever. Not out of line for them to do so, as far as the effort itself goes.

But — but, but but: It’s when one looks down a little further on this launch page that it gets interesting:

See what it says down there? Yup, that’s right: This planned site with undeniable ties to Ruth (and therefore NOM) is a project of Chick-Fil-A’s WinShape Foundation. The same Chick-Fil-A that already has some unanswered questions regarding a (now-scrubbed) sponsorship claimed by Pennsylvania’s leading anti-marriage equality group.

Now, who knows how LGBT-focused this yet-to-launch site will be. The content plan that we dug up doesn’t seem explicitly LGBT-focused:

But still: The Ruth Institute is *BEYOND* focused on gays and the civil discrimination thereof. Morse even tours around on NOM-sanctioned buses for that “godly” cause:

When we see major American companies getting in bed with that which threatens our own bedrooms, we can’t help but take note. Here’s hoping Chick-Fil-A/WinShape (to whom we’ve registered contact) will this time offer a response.

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*UPDATE: In a very odd turn of events, the site seems to have somewhat launched in the literally minutes since our post went up. Now when one loads the site, the 1/11/11 landing page is (usually) gone and there is some aggregated content from other sources. We say “usually,” because sometimes we still get the landing page.

**UPDATE3: It seems the plan is to launch this LIH effort on Saturday January 8th, with a featured 60 second spot airing during the TV movie CHANGE OF PLANS (on FOX, 8pm EST). This per an email posted on Bill Coffin’s site. The same Bill Coffin who, on 12/1/10, Tweeted the following: